it's been almost 30 years since the first desktop computers appeared. during that time, we have been promised all sorts of glorious capabilities. yet even now, the usefulness of these machines seems limited and squandered. here's a short list of things that have been promised but never delivered.

meaningful error handling. let me tell you what bugs me the most about today's error messages: i get a message reporting that some dll file isn't found. i'm never told where it isn't found. i may be able to find the dll on my own, and i could move it to where it belongsbut i don't know where that is.

smart summaries and automated abstracts. here is a never-ending classic, something that i've had probably a dozen meetings about over the past ten years. every so often, people want to tell me about their revolutionary new parsing and automatic-abstracting software. i'm told that i can now get summaries of all my e-mail, for example, without actually having to open any of my messages. i can also direct the software to find out what is on various web sites, and it will give me abstracted data. years go by, and i never hear from these people again. do they expect me to write about this stuff, sight unseen, so they can get more venture money? all i know is that i'm still waiting for this miracle software.

language translation. has anyone noticed that this part of the business has stopped far short of expectations? in fact, i saw better language-translation software ten years ago than the programs i'm seeing now. current state-of-the-art software can give you a very rough english translation. if you use the software to communicate with non-english-speaking people in their languages, you end up sounding like a freak. we were promised chat-room software that could make you seem like a native speaker. what a laugh. this whole market segment seems to have died. and you can't blame microsoft for this one.

software radio. this is a good one, too. have you ever heard of software radio? it is a radio receiver and transmission system that adapts to the kind of signal being employed by using software rather than hardware for all the hard work. in the case of 802.11, the software should be able to switch among 801.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g in an instant. and it has a lot of other promising capabilities. so where is it?

fast ports. as we approach 10-gbps speeds with newer networking gear, we discover that our machines can just barely pump out a little over 400 kbps. these computers cannot even take full advantage of the slew of inexpensive 1-gbps gear being shipped. so what's the point of 10 gbps?

easy mailing-list management. in the late 1970s, wordstar had a mail-merge feature that let you crank out personalized letters from any size mailing list. this should have led to serious mailing-list management tools, including the all-important merge/purge function needed to reduce duplication. so what happened? the mailing-list capabilities of today's software are terrible.

windows search. today's hard drives are too big for easy maintenance. files get lost, and there is no easy way to find the lost material except by using the windows find function. and the windows xp version of find is too simplistic: it fails to work properly with all files. i put in a search query for a file that i knew was on my hard drive. win xp came up with nothing. i later discovered the file, and indeed, it was in the area i was searching. win xp simply couldn't find it. why has this function deteriorated? has anyone else had such ridiculous and frustrating experiences?

driver updates. if you have a printer that can talk to an older windows os, why can't it talk to a newer version of windows? a printer has simple requirements: each character must be sent from a file to the printer. why aren't the protocols involved the same in newer versions of windows? and if they are different, then can't the changes be mapped to make the old drivers work? this baffles me.

consolidation of standards. it's not just 802.11a versus 802.11b versus 802.11g. everywhere we turn there's a battle among standards. another is sd media versus xd media versus smartmedia versus compactflash. look for blu-ray standards to be the next big fiasco.

i could go on with these complaints, and i assure you that i will at a later date. all i can say is that this business is not moving as fast as many people would like to believe.

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About the Author

John Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the host of the weekly TV video podcast CrankyGeeks. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, Barrons, MacUser, PC/Computing, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in th... See Full Bio

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